Why are values null when I add the Serializable attribute?

Question

I have a WebAPI 2, and I am trying to Post a model to one of the methods.

My full Postman request looks like this:

POST http://localhost:58900/api/v1/test HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:58900
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 295
Authorization: Bearer <<my bearer token>>
Postman-Token: 970cb0c1-3a8c-7a1e-763a-7dd916c035f3
Cache-Control: no-cache
Origin: chrome-extension://fhbjgbiflinjbdggehcddcbncdddomop
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,sv;q=0.6,fr;q=0.4

{
    MyProperty: 'Test',
    MyGuid: '67345ac2-551e-d16e-b448-e697e369dea1'
}

My controller method looks like this:

[HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]MyModel myModel)
{
    //Doing stuff
}

Everything works as expected but when I add the Serializable attribute to my model all values become null, as such:

[Serializable]
public class MyModel
{
    public string MyProperty { get; set; }
    public Guid MyGuid { get; set; }
}

[HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]MyModel myModel)
{
    //myModel.MyProperty is null and myModel.MyGuid is {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
}

I assume(?) that this is because the Serialization attribute is telling the runtime to use a binary formatter instead of the JsonFormatter specified in my configuration - but then, what is the best way to work around this?

The reason I need the Serialization attribute in the first place is to allow deep copy of the objects;

public static List<T> Clone<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list)
{
    var ms = new MemoryStream();
    var bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    bf.Serialize(ms, list);
    ms.Position = 0;
    return bf.Deserialize(ms) as List<T>;
}

Do you mean instead of `[Serializable]`? That will not work, the `Clone` method will fail to serialize the objects without `[Serializable]`. — Marcus, Jul 13 '16 at 09:14
Add it as an attribute, between `[Serializable]` and `MyModel`. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29962044/using-serializable-attribute-on-model-in-webapi — Petre T, Jul 13 '16 at 09:18
Great, that works, but I managed to solve it by changing the `Clone` method to `CloneJson` and use the JsonConvert class to deep copy the object instead.. not sure which is the best approach. Post your response as an answer please! — Marcus, Jul 13 '16 at 09:22

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 13 '16 at 09:25

Posting my own alternative answer;

One possible solution is to change the deep copy method Clone and use JsonConvert to copy the object instead, this will make it possible to remove the [Serializable] attribute from the model class;

public static T CloneJson<T>(this T source)
{
    if (ReferenceEquals(source, null)) return default(T);
    var deserializeSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings { ObjectCreationHandling = ObjectCreationHandling.Replace };
    return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(source), deserializeSettings);
}

Why are values null when I add the Serializable attribute?

1 Answers1